Animal Performances

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Animal performancesAn exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/animal relationships

Abstract Feminist science studies have given scant regard to non-human animals. In this paper, we argue that it is important for feministtheory to address the complex relationships between humans and otheranimals, and the implications of these for feminism. We use the notionof performativity, particularly as it has been developed by Karen Barad,to explore the intersections of feminism and studies of thehuman/animal relationship. Performativity, we argue, helps to challengethe persistent dichotomy between human/culture and animals/nature. Itemphasizes, moreover, how animality is a doing or becoming, not anessence; so, performativity allows us to think about the complexity of human/animal interrelating as a kind of choreography, a co-creation of

behaviour. We illustrate the discussion using the example of thelaboratory rat, who can be thought of both in terms of a materializationof specic scientic practices and as active participants in the creationof their own meaning, alongside the human participants in science.There are three, intertwined, senses in which we might think aboutperformativity that of animality, of humannness, and of therelationship between the two . Bringing animals into discussions aboutperformativity poses questions for both feminist theory and for the

study of human/animal relationships, we argue: both human and animalcan conjointly be engaged in reconguring the world, and our theorizingmust reect that complexity. We are all matter, and we all matter.

keywords animality and gender, human/animal relationship, laboratory rats, performativity

IntroductionNon-human animals are both common and rare in feminist science studies.

They are common in the sense that feminist analyses of s cience ha venecessarily paid attention to the biological sciences, which both use anddene non-human species. But they are rare in the sense that feministliterature in general has paid scant regard to how we think about animalsspecically (rather than as part of biology in general) or their place inrelation to our theory.

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TFLynda Birke University of Lancaster Mette Bryld University of Southern Denmark Nina Lykke Linkping University

Feminist Theory Copyright2004SAGE Publications

(London,Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi)vol. 5(2): 167183.

14647001DOI: 10.1177/1464700104045406

www.sagepublications.com

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Three decades ago, feminist work on science concentrated on womenshealth and on critiques of biological determinism. Among other things, thisdeterminism typically relied on parallels drawn between stories of animals

behaving in particular (instinctive) ways, and gender-stereotypic behav-iour in humans. Repudiating these claims inevitably meant that feministstended to avoid speaking about non-human animals, while emphasizingthe social construction of gender, and human uniqueness. Meanwhile, the

biological sciences have been a key focus for feminist science studies thevery areas of science which not only help to dene what animals are, butalso use non-human species extensively in the creation of biological know-ledge. In that sense, then, animals have been central to how we haveanalysed science, yet covertly so.

Although a concern with animals and how we think about them is stillrelatively rare in feminist theory, they have now begun to enter the litera-

ture admittedly, an entrance more at the pace of a tortoise than a hare(Birke, 2002). This emerging work, which theorizes intersections betweenfeminist theory and animal studies, shows many reasons why feministsshould pay attention to how we think about animals and animality, andhow humans and non-humans act together in relationship. Animality is,for example, deeply intertwined with concepts of gender, race, or sexuality(Haraway, 1989; Birke, 1994; Bryld and Lykke, 2000). Moreover, animal-ity has long served as a foil to reect what we consider to be humanuniqueness; we often refer, for instance, to humans and animals as though

they are quite separate from us and quite homogeneous. That distinction,moreover, is reinforced by disciplinary segregation: sociology hastraditionally studied humans and excluded other animals, while non-humans and their behaviour fall within the remit of biology. What isincreasingly clear, however, is that animality itself (or, the specicity of any particular kind of animal) is just as complexly constructed as genderor humanness and so does not readily fall into disciplinary divides.

In this article, we will draw on our background as feminist sciencestudies scholars and explore the intersections between feminist theory andstudies of human/animal relationships. Like Karen Barad (2003), we ndthe concept of performativity useful for analysing co- or intra-actions 1 of human and non-human actors, and we have thus begun to explore itsrelevance for the study of the human/animal interface, particularly withinthe discourses of the natural sciences, including those of popular science. 2Among other things, we argue that performativity shifts the focus towardideas of animal agency, and away from oppositional meanings of animal/human toward a more inclusive one. 3

The article is structured in three main parts. In the rst part, we drawparallels between the discourses of gender/sexuality and animality, intro-ducing the idea of animaling to describe how we culturally produce thehuman/animal divide. We then introduce the concept of performativity, tochallenge that division and to provide a fresh way of thinking abouthumans and animals. In the second part of the article we will illustratethese themes using laboratory rats as an example. In the third section, weask how feminist theory and human/animal studies may enrich each other,theoretically, using the notion of performativity.

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Performativity as nodal point between feminist theory andstudies of human/animal relationships

Judith Butler (1990, 1993) developed the concept of performativity as a keyapproach to feminist theorizing of queer perspectives, but it can also beused to think about animals and animality, we argue. In Butlers theoreti-cal work, performativity refers to the discursive practices through whichhuman gender and sexuality are enacted in socio-cultural interaction. Itindicates how gender as well as sexual identity, consequently, is somethingwe do rather than innate and essential capacities that we have or are.

By contrast, in the natural sciences, non-human animals have typically been portrayed as beings characterized by innate behaviours, including behaviours determined by sexual difference. Sociality thus emerges inci-dentally, as a product of individual animals instinctive responses. So, for

example, gender differences in non-human animals are almost alwaysseen as the result of individual differences in something intrinsic (genesor hormones); they are very rarely seen as something created by socialinteraction. This, then, is quite different from how performativity has beenused to theorize human gender, as a socio-cultural process. What seems to

be missing, in our opinion, as a result of natural sciences emphasis onsociality as product of inherent traits in animals, is much sense of non-human otherness as a doing or becoming , produced and reproduced inspecic contexts of human/non-human interaction which is where we

think that the inspiration from Butler and, more recently, Barad (2003), can be particularly important.To begin with Butlers work, with its emphasis on linguistic structures,

she suggests that discourses of queering act as founding moments of performativity (Butler, 1993); in an approximate analogy, we use the termanimaling. Like the discursive regimes which produced the word queer,so those that enabled the word animal in its specic sense of being oppo-sitional to human now reproduce power through different pejorative andinferiority-producing strategies. The noun queer emerges from hegemonicdiscourse, which posits an essential dichotomy between a heterosexualnorm and queer deviancy. Analogously, the noun animal is linked to aplethora of hegemonic discourses (philosophical, scientic, etc.), whichrely on underlying assumptions about the essence or identity of animalor human. Their effect is to sustain the opposition of Human/culturalsubject versus Animal/natural object. The Animal in these essentializingdiscourses becomes that which is not Human (i.e. without subjectivity,without intentionality a mere genetically programmed stimulus-reaction-machine: see discussion in Stibbe, 2001).

We suggest that the verbal form of the noun animal lik e the ver balform of queer can introduce a decisive break with the essentialism of the noun. Queering, notes Butler (1993), shifts the focus from an essence,other to the heterosexual norm, to a question of how queer is performedand relates to socio-cultural power relations. Queer is no longer, in thisperspective, an essence but a doing. Following a parallel line of thought,the notion of animaling can also shift perspective from animal essencesto a study of the material-semiotic performativity of human/animal

Birke et al.:Animal performances 169



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relationships. Now, there are some differences between these terms. Theword queer does cultural work both for those inside and outside speciccommunities, marking borders for both. To make the word into a verb wasa transgressive act precisely because it challenged those borders. Clearlynon-human animals are not participants in the very human act of linguis-tically constructing boundaries, so animaling cannot work in directanalogy to queering across the human/animal boundary.

Linguistic boundaries, however, can be and are maintained by humansin relation to animals. If we shift the focus from groups of individuals, torelationships, we can focus on the human/animal as a kind of hybrid, thatexists in the spaces between the two, 4 and which as a kind of hybrid can maintain boundaries with other similar hybrids. Like queering, anima-ling is a discursive process, operating between these human/animalconjunctions (thus no longer across the border of those who use speech

and those who do not). For example, how the term animal operates willdiffer between a human-and-guide-dog dyad, and (say) a human-trapping-rats dyad; the relationship between human and non-human is verydifferent in each case. This could matter in the case of disputed politics,such as disagreements between antivivisectionists, opposed to use of anyliving animal in research, and those who seek legislative reform, for whomdenitions of animals may be contested. 5 So, while it is an inexactanalogy, we suggest that animaling can also do border work between theseconjoint human/non-humans, just as queering does.

Useful though we believe it is to use these ideas to challenge (human)cultural concepts of animality, our discussion so far has remained at thelevel of spoken language by and large, the prerogative of humans. Barad(2003), however, begins her reworking of ideas of performativity by notingthat, in recent theoretical work, Language has been granted too muchpower (p. 801). Relatedly, even though we might seek to challenge thepremises on which the concept animal is founded, discussing only howthe word is used still leaves non-human animals as rather passive partici-pants in the creation of meaning.

Barads work seeks to challenge much recent scholarship in which, shenotes, . . . matters of fact (so to speak) have been replaced with mattersof signication (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discoursematters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the onlything that does not seem to matter anymore is matter (Barad, 2003: 801).In trying to move beyond representationalism (the belief that there arerepresentations and things to be represented), she turns to what she callsagential realism, using performativity as a concept to move beyond thenarrow connes of language. In this move, she refuses separation of observed object and observer, to emphasize instead phenome na . Of particular concern to us here, this development of performativity permitsinclusion of the material, including animals.

We argue that the notion of performativity can equally be applied tothinking about the intimate choreography of human/animal interrelation-ships, following Barads reformulation of the concept. Against this back-ground, we will suggest that the notion of performativity can serve a useful




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purpose in clarifying how human/animal relationships are co-constructed by discursive practices, to create emergent phenomena (the choreography,so to speak), and thus engaging both humans and non-humans in mutualintra-action.

With that in mind, we turn now to exploring a specic case study of animals in science; in our work, we have analysed several examples, suchas the behaviour of insects in documentary lms (Lykke and Bryld, 2003)and the behaviour of laboratory rats (Birke, 2003). Here, we use rats as anexample species with whom we also live closely (even if we would prefernot to acknowledge that proximity). But they have entered the laboratoryin highly specic ways, engaging in the material development of thelaboratory rat. This will bring us on to develop the idea of human/animalperformativity more fully, in later sections.

Becoming rats: animals in scientic discourse and laboratorypracticesAnalysing scientic descriptions of animal behaviour over the pastcentury, Eileen Crist (1999) notes how these have oscillated between twokinds of narrative. One, which she characterizes as internalistic, hashistorically typied naturalists writing (including Darwins): it empha-sizes animals as active subjects, and gives a phenomenological descriptionof the animals life world. It is, moreover, a style in which the observer is

often present, writing about personal observations and interactions withthe animals. The other style, characterized as externalistic, focuses onscientists efforts to objectify nature and to remove references to subjectiv-ity. 6 Unlike the stories of individuals typifying the naturalistic tradition,the externalist narratives insist on general terms, in which a single animalstands to represent the whole species, and the observer stands apart.

These two different kinds of narrative congure animals quite differ-ently. In neither is the animal particularly participative, but in the exter-nalist narrative it is almost entirely made passive. 7 As above, we will lookrst at how rats fare in narrative representations (which have been thefocus of research in several science studies), before considering how wecan move beyond representations to a position of rat performativity andanimal agency.

Some animals have meaning to us humans almost entirely in external-ist, scientic terms the laboratory rat is one example. There is relativelylittle natural history of the wild rat, so internalist narratives are rare. 8 Yetthese are animals having huge signicance for us, in folklore and in ourhistory; indeed, given the role of rats as carriers of pandemics such as

bubonic plague, there is a very real sense in which they h ave activ elyparticipated in shaping human society as we know it (Hendrickson, 1983).

Despite the dearth of rat natural history, lab rats are used in millions inscientic procedures throughout the world. But how do we humans under-stand the laboratory rat? Not surprisingly, externalist, objectifying, narra-tives are inevitable. The animals are typically referred to as the laboratoryrat, as though that descriptor denes a species, and despite the many




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dissimilarities between rats in laboratories and those in the wild (Birke,2003).

Meanwhile, lab rats are hidden from view, erased linguistically andmaterially. They are given numbers (300 rats were used); they stand asmodels for humans; how they live is rarely important enough to includein reports; they are hidden away in ranks of cages in specialized animalhouses (Birke and Smith, 1994); their use and deaths are considered moreacceptable than the use of many other animals. They become, in somesenses, data: what outside the lab might have been a naturalistic animal(like the ones in the sewers) makes a transition to being an analytic animalas parts of their bodies are transformed into laboratory artefacts (such ashistology slides: see Lynch, 1988). Not surprisingly, they are frequentlyreferred to as laboratory tools and their development described as creatingthe right tool for the job (Clarke and Fujimura, 1992). 9

Lab rats, then, are made discursively into part of the laboratory. But thisis much more than mere linguistic turns, for the entry of rats into labora-tories is profoundly embedded in a whole industry of activities and insti-tutions. This is where Barads approach is important, to locate themateriality of the rat in the processes of meaning-making. Rats are, inimportant senses, agents of their own history, and consequently of thehistory of scientic knowledge (which owes a very great deal to laboratoryanimals of all kinds).

However rats rst got into laboratories (and some certainly came from

the wild), they were soon kept (from the late nineteenth century on) to be bred selectively for laboratory use, to create specic animals to occupyspecic locations in relation to laboratory space and practice (Logan, 2001).In that sense, they have come to embody materially a whole set of specicpractices linguistic and material which dene what takes place inlaboratories. Their development from the early twentieth century was thematerialization of the demand for standardization epitomizing thedemand to be more scientic; in turn, laboratory equipment (cages, stereo-taxic equipment to immobilize animals heads and so on) has evolved tot standard rats, while rats are further standardized to t the apparatus.They have, quite literally, been bred to t the laboratory, its technologies,and its practices (Clause, 1993; Logan, 2001).

Scientists may have specic, intra-active, relationships with rats in thelaboratory (see Dewsbury, 1992) or they may not (if, for instance, someoneelse handles the rat and produces whatever rat part the scientist wantsfurther away in the laboratory). In either case, rats occupy a complex placein a wide array of material and semiotic practices, and their own behaviour

plays a crucial part . For instance, strains of rats in the early twentiethcentury were selected for specic traits, including their sexual pre cocityand their docility to enable easy handling (Logan, 2001), while a crucial partof laboratory training for humans is how to manage the behaviour of theanimal (such that human management of experimental protocols is dictated

by the rats responses: biting and squealing causes problems. See Lynch,1988). In both senses, rats behaviour played a crucial part in the develop-ment of modern science and the making of scientists.




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So, we might apply the concept of performativity here to the behaviourof the rat: the notion of lab rat is a doing, a production of meanings withinand outside of science. But, as mentioned earlier, it is important to stressthat performativity should be understood as a material-semiotic process inthe posthuman sense (Barad, 2003); the rat itself is an agent in the process,whether it obligingly reproduces to order or squeals and bites the experi-menter. So too are the technologies (cages, etc.) which produce and areproduced by rats-in-laboratories.

Indeed, what we understand as the laboratory rat is something of ahybrid, constituted jointly by the animal, the people and various associ-ated technologies (standard cages; devices for weighing or killing; food-stuffs and so on: see Birke and Michael, 1997). In that sense, laboratoryrat-ness is a part performed to t very precisely into the scientic enter-prise; meanings emerge from a nexus of apparatuses, animals and people. 10

And just as gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeatedacts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time (Butler, 1990:33) and literally embody how we are in the world, so the rat body congealsa whole set of technologies and practices.

Although at rst glance, the lab rat seems to be the epitome of oblitera-tion through standardization and the distancing stance of scientic report-ing, all of which seem to make it disappear, yet it has been an actor in itsown history. Indeed, it is precisely the role of rats as actors that can helpto destabilize the human/animal binary. The long history of standardiza-

tion, use of the passive voice, legal frameworks of animal experimen-tation, 11 and ethical justications for using non-human animals all theseoperate to maintain a clear discontinuity between humans and otheranimals. They serve to separate humans from non-humans, both in timeand space, and conceptually. Thus even though our culture sometimesincludes humans in the category animal (and nowhere is this more clearthan in biological sciences, with their belief in evolution), the practice of science perpetuates a boundary. On this boundary fence sits the rat, whichcan at times refuse to play the game of scientic object. Among otherthings, it can turn round and sink its teeth into the experimenter.

The participating animalThe separation of animals from humans, on which we focus here, has along cultural history, sitting uneasily alongside our reluctant acknow-ledgement that humans also belong in the larger category animal. But inthe practices and discourses of science, that tendency toward separation isat times re-enacted and reinforced, gaining authority and power, whether

by objectifying language or the creation of living apparatus . Ironical ly,separation is happening in the very branch of science whose centrepointtheory, evolution, would emphasize our similarity to, and continuity with,other animals.

Darwin himself, however, might not recognize the style of writing aboutanimals that has come to characterize scientic writing, 12 which becameincreasingly codied and objectifying throughout the twentieth century




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(Bazerman, 1988). In her analysis of narrative style in ethological writing,Crist argues that when ethologists and sociobiologists displace thelanguage of the lifeworld with a technical idiom, all the elements of theanimal world change, and readers nd themselves hovering over a verydifferent landscape (Crist, 1999: 87). This shift, she argues, creates anotherway of seeing (Crist, 1999: 3).

More recently, however, another way of seeing in natural science isappearing, which seems to permit animals a greater agency. In parallel withthe growth in public and academic interest in animal issues, scienticaccounts of animals have begun to change. Within ethology (the scienticstudy of animal behaviour), for example, there is growing recognition thatthe older image of animals as hard-wired automata is misleading; on thecontrary, many kinds of animals are much more self-aware, much moreconscious, than we have in our human arrogance tended to assume (e.g.

Bekoff, 2002; Rogers, 1997). Within this literature, non-human animals are beginning to appear as actors and as subjects of a life, not merely objectsof study; they are not simply acting out their instincts but are engaged incomplex decisions about their lives. Not surprisingly perhaps the writingstyle changes, too: it is hard to write about thinking, feeling individuals indistant, objectifying, ways (as Wieder, 1988, noted about laboratoryresearchers working with chimpanzees).

This perspective changes the construction of the animal. In particular,understanding what animals do when the animals in question are living

in close proximity to us (companion animals, for example) means under-standing how animals themselves participate. It also means understandinghow both human and animal are engaged in mutual decision-making, tocreate a kind of choreography, a co-creation of behaviour (see Game, 2001;Haraway, 2003; Sanders, 1999). That is not an easy understanding toobtain: empirical studies of human/animal relationships tend to draw fromsociology or ethology and inevitably focus primarily on one or otherparticipant rather than the ongoing intra-action. 13 Yet some scholars have

begun to ask questions about the relationship and its maintenance. AnnGame, for example, writes about the ne tuning of horsehuman intra-action in advanced riding, while both Haraway and Sanders write, indifferent ways, about the development of doghuman relationships. Whatis clear from these new writings is an emphasis on co-creation, a kind of mutual becoming. We are already, notes Haraway regarding our very closerelationships with domestic dogs, deeply biologically entwined and have

been ever since dogs rst chose to live with us.What these close associations also mean is that we are intra-acting not

with the scientic abstraction Equus caballus or Canis familiaris when weengage with horses or dogs, for example. On the contra ry, these are nolonger to be understood only in terms of their wild counterparts, but assomething else. In that sense, the sociological studies which have lookedat (say) human relationships with specic breeds of dogs are closer to therelationship than those natural scientic studies which continue toabstract to the wild species. Herds of wild horses on the Mongolian




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steppes 14 do not have so much in common with selectively bredcompetition horses, engaging daily with humans.

It is in the close associations of humans/animal companions that theanimals participation in performativity becomes most clear. If performa-tivity is repetitions consolidated over time (Butler, 1990: 33), then how weintra-act with companion animals sharing our lives (and some otheranimals besides) is clearly performative. If we speak of the animality of,say, a dog, we draw partly on multiple cultural representations of dogs andother non-humans. But we also infer an embodiment of the lifelong intra-action of dog with human: from its very rst breath, a puppy is usuallyengaging in a combined doghuman world.

Infant horses, similarly, must in our culture learn to socialize both withtheir mother and other horses, and also with humans, who must themselveslearn how to socialize with horses. Later, when the horse is ridden, both

horse and rider perform together in repeated acts which congeal over timeto create what Ann Game calls embodying the centaur (Game: 2001). Thisis a materialization, such that both horse and human bodies are changed ;riders seem to carry within their bodies subtle knowledge of how horsesreact as do horses of human riders. 15 Nervous impulses and muscletwitches have become transformed, new material-semiotic practices created.In so doing, a hybrid is created a hybrid which itself can have its ownperformativities and relationships to other social and cultural institutions.

In such cases of non-humans so closely associated with us, the inter-

relating of human and non-human is profoundly intimate. Not only maythe behaviour of each be nely tuned, but there are almost certainly whatHaraway (2003) has called potent transfections literal transfer of DNA

between the two. Together, dog-and-human (say) or horse-and-rider consti-tute a different entity, which is deeply enmeshed in complex social andtechnological networks and their practices (Haraway, 2003; Birke andMichael, 1997). The arbitrary allocation into social/cultural (human) and

biological (non-human) makes little sense in the light of such transfections.Yet even in the apparent abstraction of the laboratory (or, more precisely,

the animal house serving the laboratory), both rat and humans must learnto live in their highly specialized, but co-created, world. While lessfamiliar, it too involves a choreography, dancing to the tunes of experi-mental protocols. Sometimes it involves quite deliberate potent transfec-tions, 16 if the rat is injected with some human disease. But what we wouldemphasize here is the co-creation of rat and humans, through their dailyintra-actions, to produce the practices of science.

So, for many animals, they must learn to participate in a conjoint world,to work with and to recreate it, just as the human must learn to participatein the same conjoint world. Both engage in repeated acts withi n regulato ryframeworks (whether these be relatively local, such as Kennel Club rules,or more general, such as legalcultural frameworks structuring howhumans keep animals). Animals emerges not as a pre-existing category

but as something produced by these conjoint actions, and given particularpower within the set of actions we call science.




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Implications: performativity across the disciplinary divideThere are two steps in our discussion of performativity. The rst, throughanalysing how we animal the animals, attempts to bring non-humans outof the categories of biological, automata, or alien essences and to make

the human/non-human boundary more permeable. This draws on severalstudies which have looked at animal representations in, say, scienticpractice. The second step, however, moves us beyond representation, bytaking a closer look at the participation of the animal actors, and focusingon the performativity of the two participants in relationship to create some-thing that transcends both a higher order phenomenon. 17 Thus, there arethree kinds of performativity here of animality, of humannness, and of the relationship between the two .

In this nal section, we outline some of the ways in which theseconsiderations might usefully cut across disciplinary divides. In particu-lar, we suggest that feminist theory could benet from a more sustainedanalysis of animality and how humans and animals mutually engage;likewise, studies of the human/animal relationship could also benet fromfeminist scholars interrogation of gender and its performativity. In turn,we also ask about how these questions generate some further implicationsfor thinking about performativity.

Why does thinking about human/animal performativity matter tofeminist science studies, or human/animal studies? One of the ways inwhich animal studies may inuence feminist theory crucially is by offeringa productive site for elaborating the burning question of the agency of matter and biological bodies. Much feminist theorizing has emphasized theways in which bodies matter. In the last decade a growing number of feminist theoreticians (e.g. Haraway, 1991; Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994;Braidotti, 2002) have addressed the question and tried to shift the perspec-tive from looking at the body as a mere passive recipient of social inscrip-tions to an outlook which sees the body as an active agent co-acting orintra-acting with social inscriptions. We suggest that a focus on animalscan add new productive dimensions to these discussions, so posing the

question of the agency of matter in complex new ways.Animal studies may thus make up a productive site for examining the

agency of matter, but avoiding some of the pitfalls. When we, for example,talk about the agency of matter in the shape of human bodies, it is easy toslip back into a discussion of human subjectivity as though it is notembodied. And when we consider the agency of machines and non-organicmatter, it is also easy to short-circuit the discussion back into mere humaninstrumentation or orchestration of machinic performance, once againsetting the human subject as the prime mover.

Contrary to both human bodies and machines, however, animals a re lesseasily discarded as subjects in their own right. They are, on the one hand,dened as non-human matter in anthropocentric Western philosophy. Buton the other hand, even hard-core instrumentalizing behaviourism or socio-

biology is adapting to new understandings of animal cognition, so that non-humans are now less often reduced to the status of controlled robots.




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Debates from feminist theory can also aid work on the human/animalrelationship. We noted earlier, for instance, how a consideration of human/non-human dyads (rather than on humans or non-humans) mightprovide a fresh focus, from which to evaluate how borders might be trans-gressed, and how conjoined agency might operate. Consider, too, Baradsuse of performativity to break through the persistent dichotomy betweenlanguage/representation and the material that is represented. Matter, sheproposes, is not a xed substance, but a doing; that is, matter the concernof science must be understood as jointly emerging from material anddiscursive factors (Barad, 2003).

Thinking about how we think about animals is useful here, as animals both are the material stuff which (biological) science studies and have an(increasingly recognized) subjectivity. If dogness, say, is a material and discursive product, then we have to understand that in its relationality and

performativity. We cannot hope to understand it by selectively focusing onthe behaviour of dogs as though they were domesticated wolves, to bestudied objectively through science. The problem here is that, at themoment, science is not very good at understanding relationality. Anecdotesabound and data are few (though, as Bekoff points out, we should heedthese stories, for the plural of anecdotes is data: Bekoff, 2002: 47). Ratherthan pursuing an illusory objectivity, scientic studies of animals and of human/animal relationships might usefully borrow from feminist theory,and focus instead on the performance of human-plus-non-human where

the constituting discursive practices must be understood to include thematerial, participating non-human.While advocating performativity as a useful tool in aiding our thinking

about humans and animals, however, there are two dangers. The rst isthat performativity may be seen only as a product of the individualsengagement with her social world. What we would emphasize here,however, is the need to focus also on relationships , which may themselvesgenerate their own performativities; that is, as we noted before, performa-tivity can be thought about in three ways the human, the animal, and theconjoint hybrid (however that is constituted).

Second, we have written about performativity in a way that suggests thatthe relationship of human to non-human creates an emerging order. Indeed but it can also generate disorder, the unravelling of social predictability.Michael (2004) discusses how the interruptions of non-human animalscan completely alter sociological research interviews (and everyday socialencounters). At times, these interruptions may be construed as misbe-haviour on the part of the animal, by either the interviewee or theresearcher. In this case, the engagement of the animal is disrupting thecreation of social data in ways likely to reinforce its own ca tegorizati oninto animality. Both humans and non-humans, argues Michael, acttogether to produce both order and disorder in their joint social worlds.




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ConclusionsThinking about human relationships to animals raises crucial questionsnot only for feminism but for science studies in general. Animals, after all,are part of what scientists study. Like gender performativity, the processes

of human/animal relating constitute discursive practices which createanimality and which reproduce relations of power. For in the case of those animals closest to us, it is those behaviours with which we caninteract easily which will be reproduced: we humans do not wish to livetoo closely with the ferocity of savage nature. This is evident if we thinkabout the development of companion animals and their socialization intohumanly acceptable forms of behaviour. It is even more evident in the caseof laboratory rodents, transformed by breeding programmes into placid

bearers of data.As we implied earlier, biology emphasizes both our similarity and

dissimilarity to non-human animals. Similarity is assumed wheneverscientists use animals in laboratories as physiological stand-ins, forinstance as rat models for some human disease. It is assumed whenever

biologists speculate on the evolutionary origins of particular human traits.But there are also sets of practices and performativities, both human andnon-human, which reproduce the animal as something apart, as different.Understanding how those work is central to understanding science, andthe way that its discursive practices themselves create the species differ-ences that science studies. Indeed, we might even say that the very use of non-human animals in laboratory science enacts a radical discontinuity

between non-human and human. Using concepts of performativity can, weargue, help us to challenge that separation of non-humans from humans;

both human and animal can conjointly be engaged in reconguring theworld, as Barad (2003) notes. We are all matter, and we all matter.

Feminism needs, we suggest, to analyse further the processes wherebythese differences are created, particularly through the authoritative voicesof science. We need to understand more about animality and hence,humanness and how that cuts across gender. But that must be done in

ways that allow for animal agency, participation, and performativity whether they are stag beetles, laboratory rodents, or companions by thefeminist reside.

AcknowledgementsWe are very grateful to Consuelo Rivera and Mike Michael and to anonymousreferees, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to partici-pants in our panel on animals and performativity, at the meeting of the Societyfor Literature and Science in Aarhus, Denmark, 2002.

Notes1. Barad (2003: 815) substitutes the notion of inter-action with

intra-action in order to stress that the actors in a performativerelationship should not be seen as distinct entities, acting upon eachother from outside, but as intertwined agencies which mutuallyconstruct each other. We will follow this practice in the article.


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2. This is an ongoing project; we rst presented work on this, usingexamples from insects in natural history documentaries, and laboratoryrats, at a meeting of the Society for Literature and Science, at Aarhus,Denmark, 2002 (and see Lykke and Bryld, 2003; Birke, 2003). The role of insect actors and visual technologies in the production of popular lm

documentaries is a particular focus of this work, as well as examples fromethology.

3. Throughout this paper, we use the term animal to denote non-humananimal species, unless otherwise specied. The word animal carriesmany layers of meanings, and can certainly include humans (as in the

biological classication of the animal kingdom). However, we chose tofollow common colloquial use of animal as not human, precisely toexplore the issues raised by cultural separation of non-human animalsfrom humans particularly in science. Note that animal here isprofoundly homogenizing, as though each kind of animal is the same,instead of profoundly different. They are only the same in the effect of theword animal as counterpoint to human itself not a straightforwardterm. Midgley (1978) explores the signicance of that opposition inWestern culture in her aptly named Beast and Man . Later in the paper weaddress the more inclusive sense of animal/human, which sits moreeasily with the notion of performativity.

4. See for example Birke and Michael (1997) who discuss such culturalhybrids and their constitution through intervening technologies (such asdog leads). Also see Michael (2004).

5. Thus, the legislation governing animal use in scientic research in the UKcovers all vertebrates and now includes cephalopod molluscs (squid andoctopus), while in the US some animals (including rats and mice) areexcluded from the denition of animal for the purposes of the legislation.

6. One of us (LB) disagrees with Crist in that early ethology did still beartraces of the natural history heritage. The externalist imperative was,however, true by the late 1960s, and part of LBs training in ethology thenemphasized the need to avoid at all costs anthropomorphism (seeKennedy, 1992).

7. We explore this further in relation to the behaviour of insects in natural

history documentaries; see Lykke and Bryld (2003).8. With one or two exceptions, such as Barnetts study of the rat, which

partly employs an internalist style (Barnett, 2001).9. Such terminology implies that tools are passive objects; but, as Barad

emphasizes, tools and apparatuses are themselves part of themeaning-making of science and as such should be thought of as havingagency. Our point here is to stress how often animals are referred to astools in scientic literature.

10. Nearly forty years ago, one commentator noted that the white lab rat is. . . so entrenched in its cozy new habitat that it has inuenti al member sof the host species emotionally committed to its continued welfare(Lockard, 1968). Although we have not drawn explicitly on actor networktheory here, this enrolment of welfare-minded people by lab rats is anexample of how networks are created between humans and non-humans(animals or technological artefacts: see Callon and Law, 1982; Philo andWilbert, 2000).




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11. See note 6, above.12. Darwin was quite prepared, for instance, to write about the emotions of

animals, and to quote from single examples in ways that would probablynot be acceptable today.

13. Crowell-Davis (1992) notes the lack of studies of human/horse

interaction, and effects of humans on horses, despite the clear benetssuch research might bring to the performance of horses in competitions.That lack remains true ten years later.

14. If there is such a thing as the original wild horse: even the indigenousPrzewalskis horse has had to be reintroduced into Mongolia.

15. Anecdotes abound in the world of riding for the disabled of horsesapparently helping to keep disabled children on their backs.

16. It is ironic that for some experimental purposes colonies of lab animalshave to be protected from human-borne disease by living their lives

behind barriers. Potent transfections indeed.17. Fausto-Sterling (2003) notes how discussion of Butlers notion of

performativity of gender could usefully be extended to how non-humananimal gender develops, rather than the widespread assumption thatgender in non-humans emerges out of some genetic blueprint. She drawson Developmental Systems Theory (also see papers in Oyama et al.,2001), which insists on understanding how organisms develop as systemsof processes; genes and environment are part of these systems but cannot

be separated out. Together, they create something emergent, or higherorder the form of the organism. Even the gender of the humble

laboratory rat cannot simply be attributed to genes, as the mothers behaviour toward her offspring (among other things) inuencesgender-related behaviour.

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Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming . Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Lynda Birke is a feminist biologist, now retired from a senior post in the centrefor the study of women and gender at the University of Warwick, UK. She haspublished both in animal behaviour and in feminist theory, and most recentlyhas concentrated her research on the intersections between feminism andhuman/animal studies. She also continues to do scientic work in animalwelfare. She is associate editor of the journal Society and Animals , and is onthe advisory board of Feminist Theory . Recent books include Feminism and the Biological Body (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Common Science? (with Jean Barr, Indiana University Press).

Nina Lykke is head of the Ph.D. programme in the interdisciplinarydepartment of gender studies, Linkping University, Sweden, and head of theNordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. She haspublished extensively within the elds of feminist theory and feministcultural studies of technoscience, including the books Between Monsters,Goddesses and Cyborgs, Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (co-editor Rosi Braidotti; London, Zed, 1996) and Cosmodolphins; Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (co-authorMette Bryld; London, Zed, 2000). She is associate editor of the European

Journal of Womens Studies and currently scientic co-coordinator of theresearch project New visualisation- and simulator technologi es: Theirmeaning for learning and knowledge production in Gynaecology. E-pelvis andultrasound-scanning, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Address: Department of Gender Studies, Linkping University, SE 581 83Linkping, Sweden. Email: [email protected]




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Mette Bryld is associate professor at the institute of literature, culture andmedia, University of Southern Denmark. For several years she has been doingfeminist cultural studies of technoscience and has published articles and

books. She is currently doing research on the Swedish photographer, LennartNilssons science documentaries, and on the notion of performativity and

animality (with N. Lykke and L. Birke).Address: Institute of Literature, Culture and Media, University of SouthernDenmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. Email:[email protected]

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